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continent, and could, as he has frequently done, pronounce the bravest men to be cowards, and the most irreproachable women to be subjects of contempt, without our having any means of contradicting or punishing such assertions. CHAPTER 14. Conspiracy of Moreau and Pichegru. The news had just arrived at Berlin of the great conspiracy of Moreau, of Pichegru, and of George Cadoudal. There was certainly among the principal heads of the republican and royalist parties a strong desire to overturn the authority of the first consul, and to oppose themselves to the still more tyrannical authority which he resolved to establish on making himself be declared emperor: but it has been said, and perhaps not without foundation, that this conspiracy, which has so well served Bonaparte's tyranny, was encouraged by himself, from his wish to take advantage of it, with a Machiavelian art, of which it is of consequence to observe all the springs. He sent an exiled jacobin into England, who could only obtain his return to France by services to be performed for the first consul. This man presented himself, like Sinon in the city of Troy describing himself as persecuted by the Greeks. He saw several emigrants who had neither the vices nor the faculties necessary to detect a certain kind of villainy. He found it therefore a matter of great ease to entrap an old bishop, an old officer, in short some of the wrecks of a government, under which it was scarcely known what factions were. In the sequel he wrote a pamphlet in which he mystified, with a great deal of wit, all who had believed him, and who in truth ought to have made up what they wanted in sagacity by firmness of principle, that is to say, never to place the least confidence in a man capable of bad actions. We have all our own way at looking at things; but from the moment that a person has shewn himself to be treacherous or cruel, God alone can pardon, for it belongs to him only to read the human heart sufficiently to know if it is changed; man ought to keep himself for ever at a distance from the person who has lost his esteem. This disguised agent of Bonaparte pretended that the elements of revolt existed in France to a great extent; he went to Munich to find an English envoy, Mr. Drake, whom he also contrived to deceive. A citizen of Great Britain ought to have kept clear of this web of artifice, composed of the crossed threads of jacobinism and tyranny. George and
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